Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider Meta seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. On Monday, the social networking singularity said it would spend $50 billion to expand its Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, from 2.2 to 5 gigawatts. The news comes less than a week after a report broke claiming that Meta was actively exploring options …
"Both are immensely profitable, earning $132.2 billion and $60.5 billion in profits last year, respectively. That's profit, not revenue."
Which is why we're stuck with AI generated spam forever. The spammers pay Meta, Google, and everyone else for the spamvertising ads they spew to fleece people with.
> Both Meta and Google offer various services which generate revenues by connecting users with advertisers.
Let's be clear here: Both are making that insane amounts by basically selling the eyeballs of their users to advertisers under the pretense of offering services to end-users for free.
Meta can use this advertising money to build AI-related infrastructure services that can be rented to AI companies, even though
- AI companies have yet to figure out how to make a profit or any sustainable business at all
- The recent bills of AI companies shocked their customers into re-evaluating their credit lines ( and their AI strategies).
- xAI is already renting out over-commited infrastructure to competitors.
But then what? Wait for AI customers and/or AI companies to go broke?
Meta has a proven track record of blowing billions into Zuckerberg's bad ideas and I fully expect this one to be at least as successful as the Metaverse.
Let's be clear here: Both are making that insane amounts by basically selling the eyeballs of their users to advertisers under the pretense of offering services to end-users for free.
How is it a pretence?
They do offer services to users for no monetary cost?
Both Meta and Google started as service companies; it's only once they'd built the digital cow they realised how much they could milk it.
Let's be clear here: People are quite happy to take stuff for free.
These companies would be a lot less influential if we went back to paying for stuff up front. That genie's probably long since gone though....
Would be similar to MS, AWS and GCP, except they would scrape all the data you stored on their cloud to push advertising to you and allow all manner of dubious organisations to perform analytics on it for nefarious reasons.
Wouldn't trust Meta with any of my data full stop(before you ask, no I don't use ANY of their ad-selling slop services)
You think ?
Of course all three will eventually be at ambient the day after… their last day, but I wasn't thinking that. They all exhibit that malign gormlessness that threatens everybody and everything in today's world. Not cool at all. Not one little bit.
Zaphod - "Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off."
Zaphod - "Look, I’m up to here with cool OK? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis."
Who are forced to admit their appetite for AI capacity is larger than their ability to use it.
If we see OpenAI do the same then the clock will be ticking for the bubble to burst and it all to come crashing down.
It is funny that Meta is spending $50 billion on more capacity when they already can't use what they have now. That's probably because the month to month rental rates being paid by those in shortage (Anthropic and Google) will the full cost of buildout in 2 or 3 years so to a beancounter it sounds like a great investment. Unless of course the rental market dries up, so you're in overcapacity and then have another $50 billion worth of new capacity coming online you have no use for!
Meta’s push into AI infrastructure is definitely a major shift from being just a social media company. Building massive data centers could give them more control over AI development and cloud services, but the cost and energy requirements are huge challenges. It will be interesting to see whether Meta can turn this investment into a real competitor in the cloud market or if it becomes an expensive bet.
